“Mac OS X 10.5.2 Update, the next in a year-long series of planned updates to Apple’s new Leopard operating system, promises to be one of the most hefty maintenance releases put out by the company for its operating system software in recent years. According to people familiar with the matter, Tuesday evening gave way to the first test builds of the software update for developers, including a 354MB bare-bones delta build and a 362MB combo updater- both of which were labeled OS X 10.5.2 build 9C7.”
I really hope this will fix the slow bootup issues I have with Leopard – although it doesn’t look like it.
It’s disappointing to say the least that my father’s far slower Macbook running Tiger boots over a minute faster than mine.
( see also http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5859407&tstart=0 )
Other than that, getting the daily Wifi problems fixed will make me a happy bunny.
I hope they get rid of that crappy application firewall and go back to using IPFW2 . Arghhh!
“I hope they get rid of that crappy application firewall and go back to using IPFW2 . Arghhh!”
I’m not a regular Mac OS X user, but didn’t it use the packet filter (pf) instead of the IP firewall (ipfw2), or am I mixing up things here?
From my experience, ipfw2 (used on FreeBSD machines) does a great job. along with its ability to be configured very easily. You can setup a well configured firewall mechanism with very few rules and still have intended things working.
Well OSX never had PF as in OpenBSD’s pf see link http://www.netbsd.org/docs/network/pf.html . The firewall that was in 10.4 and is still in 10.5 is IPFW from FreeBSD see link http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ipfw&apropos=0&sektion=0&m…
The current thing apple is calling the firewall, is the Apple Application Firewall. This does not work the same way say PF or IPFW would. Rather then work by hooking into the kernel and filtering networking data at a low level; where you can see if the data is tcp or udp, the application firewall is allowing or denying applications ability to talk to the network. I.E. should safari.app be able to send and receive data. Now this is not a bad idea but the issue I have is that the front end program apple made for OS 10.5 is does not let you setup IPFW rules saying block all TCP traffic from IP BLAH. or Deny all IP in and then setup explicit allow rules. Apple IMHO needs to add and advanced firewall editing in the system prefs gizmo for the firewall to allow you to add ipfw rules . The application firewall’s default setup does not address a number of firewall issues that ipfw + the application firewall could.
Thank you for the quick reply and good clarification.
As far as I see, some functionalities of IPFW and the Application firewall do overlap, e. g. when ipfw is used to deny everything except the intended services in, and the Application firewall has to allow traffic for these services.
So, if I am correct, there needs to be a kind of link between the IPFW and AFW. For example, if you setup something for IPFW like “add allow tcp from any to any ftp” then the FTP service should be allowed to make connections and receive / send data, where the AFW would be responsible for.
“Now this is not a bad idea but the issue I have is that the front end program apple made for OS 10.5 is does not let you setup IPFW rules saying block all TCP traffic from IP BLAH. or Deny all IP in and then setup explicit allow rules.”
Assuming that the some of the unterlying FreeBSD stuff is still intact, isn’t it possible to create /etc/ipfw.rules and enter the intended rules, and then start /etc/rc.d/ipfw?
“Apple IMHO needs to add and advanced firewall editing in the system prefs gizmo for the firewall to allow you to add ipfw rules . The application firewall’s default setup does not address a number of firewall issues that ipfw + the application firewall could.”
A nice GUI frontend would be a good idea.
Doc Pain,
So IPFW and AFW do not really overlap. I use my own ipfw.sh script Its not managed by launchd . NetBSD’s RCng its not used by apple so no I could not use /etc/rc.d/BLAH . It should not be that hard to my script be managed by launchd or make a launchd script to kick off a custom RCng setup but it would be icky.
Application firewalls are interesting, however Networking firewalls work better in say 90% of the cases where you want to limit traffic over the network. The one thing the application firewall can do is say setup a rule to say “jim can not use safari to make files in /home/jim/Desktop but can create files in /home/jim/Downloads ” Also it can make rules to say “Jim can not use text edit when jane is logged in”
So you could say make an app that does something like this . “If jim opens safari and goes to badsite and bad site connects scans me run ipfw to block all ip from badhost. ” If apple were to make this it would be earth shattering . I do not know of anyting that currently does this on the Mac .
Apple does a good job at making UNIX gui things. But the firewall tool seams like an afterthought.
Unfortunately they don’t mention anything about the 100’s of networking issues with 10.5.1.
Apple need to fix various problems with Kerberos, Windows Networking/sharing and Active Directory authentication. Without this we can’t actually purchase any new Macs for our Organization so the problem is quite serious.
WOW! the first update was 97MB, and its zoomed all the way up to 362MB – Apple must have been doing alot of development – 10.5.1 must have only been the updated parts which were ‘stable’ enough to be released – so all of this must have been going on since the launch of 10.5.
Return it all to the store and trade it in for a PC with WinDuhs!
Nah! Every time Apple updates I get a faster computer.
…that they rushed this puppy out the door a bit sooner than they would have liked. Ah well. I haven’t had any issues w/Leopard yet… thankfully.
The size of the patch has nothing to do with the amount of bugs fixed or left unfixed.
Also the first .1 update to any Mac OS X version, has always been between the first twenty days after the release; the existance of a .1 14 days after release date, doesn’t have anything to do with rushing or releasing “sooner”.
Leopard has issues, lots. But it’s a great OS overall. Jumping from a “stable” tiger to an unstable Leopard is what might be annoying people. But the OS is great. It just fails in small (and not so small) things that used to work relatively well under tiger/panther.
I, for one, welcome the new finder with love, the fact that samba shares are now “almost properly” handled is a ++ for those of us who happen to have other Samba/Windows machines hanging around.
No, I was looking at the change list (there was another one presented by someone else that I saw that listed out the applications that were affected and it was substantial, but I don’t know where I saw it now).
And I agree with you about Leopard, I am typing this message on 10.5.1, safari 3.0.4. It’s a great OS *and* I use it for work, tunneling into our network which is laden with Linux and Windows server machines.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/12/19/mac_os_x_10_5_2_to_de…
Basically its a list of 37 items, and also SSE4 enhancements too. Its quite a big improvement; from the rumours that are floating around it sounds like Apple’s ‘Service Pack 2’ which includes some big changes; possibly even write support for ZFS
I find it funny when people claimed that 10.5 was rushed given that most people who have Macs here came when Mac OS X 10 was sitting at 10.4.5. I remember when 10.3 first came out, it was buggy, but it wasn’t as ‘connected’ as it is today, so the whine factor was a lot quieter.
Apple has always had the ‘release early, release often’ – oh, and the bugs in Mac such as the one shown with the networking has been a known Finder bug for quite some time – the difference is now that with more users, there is greater scrutiny. The difference is, as far as I see, Apple is stepping up to the challenge when it comes to address user issues.
As for people who have ‘problems’, they tend to be like Windows users – I don’t know what the heck they do with their computer, it it amazes me how they can muck something up so much it even confuses me!
I’ve been using OS X since the first Beta release of 10.0. Before that I was on 8.x-9.x.
I also have the advantage of having worked at a large computer corporation on several products and there were more than several instances when said company released software knowing there were some serious issues (at go-live meetings they would categorize bugs by the likelihood of a user encountering them), already working on the patches, all because they wanted to get it out on a specific “date.” It’s a stupid thing to do in my opinion, but that is why I am a programmer, not an administrator or marketing expert.
I’m always surprised just how bad some marketers actually are when it comes to spin – if a product is late, it can easily be spun that ‘extended testing’ then proceed to bash a rival; that tends to work most of the time, especially with the devotee’s.
Sure, as an end user I don’t expect every problem to be resolved. but I think those in marketing and administration need to realise that if customers can’t even get the thing up and running – thats a BIG problem; that’s a show stopper.
Hence, when I did hear about issues with Leopard installs, the first question I asked – what on earth were the testers doing? this should have been detected easily by some pretty basic installations and feedback.
Although I fear the ‘man month myth’ post coming up behind, I do think that Apple need to hire more programmers; programmers dedicated solely to bug fixing. Breathing, eating and living bug fixing.
We had one bug that could literally crash the system (not an application, the entire OS). We told the manager in charge of making the decision to go live or hold off (I was in a QA group at the time) that he should really delay this. The delay would have been two weeks, really. Not that bad. But the manager decided that the bug was so obscure and the chances of it being triggered so small that it would be O.K. to ship.
Day after one of our largest customers installed the upgrade *BAM* they managed to trigger the bug and crash their system. Crazy decision.
I don’t understand, at times, what the big rush is. I mean, I guess I do, it has to do often with sales… upper management, sales, promise a new client that we will be able to do XYZ for them if the sign a contract… then the engineers are told “we need XYZ by this date,” and that date is usually insanely close to the moment the requirements are handed to us.
It certainly makes for an intense development cycle.
True; mind you, I’m surprised that you guys didn’t market your way out of it – ‘we’ve delayed the launch of our product as we have found a last minute bug’; then create a big speal about how your company values customers, and always puts product quality first ahead of profits etc.
For every delay there is opportunity to play the moral high ground, we love/care for our customers ahead of profits etc. blather – and believe me, a sizeable number of customers swallow it hook, line and sinker.
from using Intels new compilers for the Penryn architecture. The have to recompile a large part of the system to benefit from the new compiler. This alone will make the update large – without any bug fixed.
Edited 2007-12-20 08:36
Apple compiles OS X with GCC, not Intel’s compilers.
It might have something to do with it, since they don’t list whether that’s PowerPC or Intel code. My PowerPC 10.5.1 was quite small–under 40 MB–compared to the Intel-based code.
Unfortunately, they have a plethora of bugs to fix, some small, some large. It would be nice to have a stable and faster system.
Personally I’m quite happy to see such a large list. Its a shame from the perspective that there were that many bugs to fix, but on the other hand its really good that they are fixing them!
small bugs here and there, but still the greatest OS for DESKTOP! Can not wait for .2 update . My mac mini has been running without reboot for 26 days already, when 2. came, it will be over 1 month!
I am looking forward to the hierarchical change to the Dock. I have so many apps, they all will be viewable with this new addition to the preferences.